


Only If For A Night

by CharlieTheUnicorn



Series: The Evil That Men Do [1]
Category: Compilation of Final Fantasy VII
Genre: Alternate Timelines, Anal, Angst, Blood, Body Horror, Established Relationship, Eventual Smut, Explicit Language, Explicit Sexual Content, Feelings, Fluff, Hurt/Comfort, Internalized Homophobia, Light Bondage, M/M, Minor Violence, Not beta read (haha sorry), Oral Sex, Rating is for later chapters, Reunion Sex, Reunions, Scars, Slurs, Smut, Trauma
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-21
Updated: 2020-07-02
Packaged: 2021-03-04 05:21:02
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 6
Words: 20,305
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24838336
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CharlieTheUnicorn/pseuds/CharlieTheUnicorn
Summary: When they were partners, Vincent and Veld made a pact to one another that if they weren't married by the time Vincent turned forty they would marry each other. On what should have been Vincent's fortieth birthday, Veld visits Shinra Mansion in an attempt to lay his partner's ghost to rest, but is shocked to find Vincent alive. The two men have a lot of catching up to do.
Relationships: Vincent Valentine & Veld, Vincent Valentine/Veld
Series: The Evil That Men Do [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1915894
Comments: 24
Kudos: 101





	1. Wedding Day

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Son](https://archiveofourown.org/works/23071255) by [She_sees_in_the_dark](https://archiveofourown.org/users/She_sees_in_the_dark/pseuds/She_sees_in_the_dark). 



> Set about 17 years before the events in FFVII. 
> 
> I fell in love with this pairing largely because of She_sees_in_the_dark's absolutely adorable, incredibly wholesome fic "Son." It's honestly so heartwarming and cute that I feel a bit guilty plugging it here, but everyone should definitely read it.
> 
> Also, this is my first time publishing anything, so criticisms/encouragement are welcome.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Suggested listening: "Wake Up" by Silverstein https://open.spotify.com/track/5OMMgDcBINvnQ8SQjdXwy8?si=Nsl9WgyeTPS7DWHIrUgfzA
> 
> My Spotify playlist for this pairing (very in progress) : https://open.spotify.com/playlist/2PhNmj3fBpe7elJlL5KW3P

Rain poured heavily from a grey sky as Veld bounced along a rocky country road in the passenger seat of an old pickup truck. It was an attractive countryside, all things considered, surrounding an attractive village. It seemed so quaint here, so quiet. So safe. He stared out the window as Nibelheim shrank in the distance, lost in thought.

That was the way Nibelheim had sounded on paper, too: quiet and safe. The same with the Jenova Project; playing bodyguard to a few scientists in an elegant mansion in the countryside sounded like the safest job a Turk could hope for. The sort of thing they could use a normal bodyguard for, almost. 

And yet, he had sent Vincent here thirteen years ago, and his partner had never come back.

Vincent should have turned forty today. It cut deeper than he imagined it could, after all of these years. They’d had this stupid pact, more than half a joke, that if they weren’t married by the time Vincent turned forty they would marry each other. The impropriety of it would have destroyed them both, of course, but Veld found himself thinking that he would do it in an instant, were only Vincent still here.

 _This isn’t how I wanted to spend our wedding day, asshole,_ he thought to himself, somewhere between agony and mournful amusement. He clutched his fingers tighter around the bouquet of flowers in his hand. He jerked his head up at the grind of the clutch as the truck lurched into park.

“Here ya go, pal,” drawled the wrinkled man in the driver’s seat. “Same time tomorrow?” Veld confirmed with a nod, passing the man the gil he owed him for the ride.

Veld found himself standing outside of Shinra Mansion in the rain. He hurried inside despite the pit in his stomach, wincing at the scream of the door on its hinges as he pushed it open. Cursing, he shook himself out of his dripping coat and hung it on a peg by the door. Somewhat dryer now, he began fumbling for the switch to the electric lights. They flickered to life with a faint crackle, but even they couldn’t lift the gloom that wrapped this mansion like a mantle.

He hadn’t been here since he’d been sent to investigate after Hojo reported the disappearance of the other scientists and one Turk by the name of Vincent Valentine. Other than a thick layer of dust coating every surface, nothing seemed to have changed. Veld wasn’t sure what he was doing here. He usually spent the important days—birthdays, anniversaries, promotions—at the gravesite. But that hadn’t felt like enough, for today—kneeling at an empty grave. He needed to be closer to him, and so he’d come to this mansion hoping it might hold some echo of his partner, some ghost.

“Damn it, Vincent,” he murmured into the vaulting antechamber, noticing the eerie way his voice echoed back. “What happened in this creepy old mansion?”

He wandered the halls in silence, waiting for voices to speak to him from the past. After some time had passed, he found himself in the basement. Something about the basement had always unnerved him, and the passage of time had only made the feeling worse. Something had _happened_ here. He could feel it in every fiber of his being, but no matter how hard he had scoured, he could never find a thing. He closed his eyes and tried to fight off the wave of pain that washed over him, guilt and loss hitting him like something physical. He tried to call mind every happy memory he could think of, every flash of light in the darkness.

_The first time he ever saw Vincent smile. He was still a cadet at the time, and Veld had known him almost a year. Almost a year before the youth finally felt comfortable enough around him to show emotion. It was a beautiful thing when it finally happened, though, unfurling in that passive face of his like a flower blooming through a crack in marble. And Veld had understood that smile. For the first time in his life, the boy felt like he belonged._

_Vincent’s shocked face when he’d told him he’d chosen him as his partner blooming slowly to pride as Veld explained that he would have it no other way. The comfortable familiarity of working together. They made a good team, Vincent honey to his vinegar. The boy was quiet, pretty, easy to underestimate. Easy to forget about. His unwavering calm had a way of soothing people, where Veld had ever only held talent in ruffling feathers._

_The first time Vincent had kissed him—a heat-of-the-moment thing, an understandable reaction to finding oneself spared from a death they had thought certain, but the young man’s mouth had felt so warm on his, firm and full, and Veld knew this was something he could quickly see becoming habit…_

A screech to his left jarred him from his memories with just enough time left to dodge. He swore as the beast’s claws clipped his arm, and he fumbled for his pistol in the near-darkness of the basement. How had he let his guard down so thoroughly? He cursed himself. He hadn’t even gotten a good look at the thing that had retreated back into the shadows, didn’t even know what he was dealing with. He made his way further into the basement, towards an area where the lights bloomed brighter. He began to see more shapes outlined in the dark, scuttling about in the lightening shadows as they trailed after Veld. There were so many of them, and he was so far from the exit now. He glanced around, looking desperately for a way out.

Just as he thought hope was lost, he saw it; a doorway. He emptied his clip into the lock until the door came open and slammed it shut behind him, turning to survey the room for something he might be able to use to barricade the door.

He found himself surrounded by coffins.

“What the fuck?” he breathed into the dimness. With shaky hands, he pulled the lid off the nearest casket. He let out a sigh of relief as it opened. It was empty. He wedged the lid beneath the door handle, hoping the makeshift barricade would hold long enough for him to find some way out of here. As he begins to make his way to the far side of the room, a noise sends a shudder down his spine. It’s unmistakable: pounding, from inside one of the coffins. With steady hands and shaking breath, he aims his pistol towards the lock holding tight the lid.

 _Best get this over with,_ he thought grimly, shooting the lock to release the lid, freeing whatever lay inside. He steadied himself. He had no choice but to be ready for whatever monster wait there. He pushed away all expectation, all judgement and steeled himself for anything. Any monster in the world could have risen from that casket, and Veld would have killed it without flinching. Veld was prepared for a monster.

What he was _not_ prepared for was a man, pale and too thin, but undeniably alive. For a long while, all Veld could do was stare. _This is it,_ he decided. _I’ve finally gone mad._ The man raised a familiar pistol in Veld’s direction, and Veld raised his hands helplessly. If this is how he died, then so be it. Perhaps he deserved it. But he refused to turn his gun on this spectre.

The crack of Vincent’s hand cannon snapped him from his daze, and he was vaguely aware of the sound of a body hitting the ground behind him. A moment of silence passed.

“What the fuck,” Veld stated, disbelieving. Vincent still wasn’t looking at him. Veld finally regathered his wits, realized the monster Vincent had killed wasn’t the only one. He began to spin towards the door, but he was vaguely aware it was too late. There was one close, too close.

Briefly, Vincent… _stepped outside of reality,_ he didn’t know how else to describe it. He turned incorporeal, his form a swirl of scarlet that wrapped Veld before solidifying into his partner’s form. Some small, instinctive part of his brain that was still functioning braced himself for the sound of Vincent’s handgun at close range, but was met with the monster’s dying squeals instead. Nibel wolves, Veld realized finally. Vincent withdrew, clasping something red and wet— _its fucking heart,_ he realized numbly—in his fingers. No. In his _claws_.

“What the **_fuck_** ,” he repeated, despondently.

“Later, Veld,” Vincent intoned firmly, voice gravelly from disuse but so achingly, terribly familiar. He rested a hand on Veld’s shoulder—a human one, clad in a black leather glove—as if trying to reassure his partner that he wasn’t a ghost. “Other things to do now.”

He inclined his head towards the hallway and reloaded his revolver, taking aim at the first of the Nibel wolves charging them from the hallway, eyes glowing green with mako. The crack of Vincent’s gun, followed by the thud of a body, brought him back to reality. Veld drew his own pistol and took aim, managing to take down a Nibel wolf in two quick shots despite the gentle trembling of his hands. And just like that, they fell into a rhythm, fighting together as familiar to the both of them as the backs of their hands. The motions were ingrained somewhere deep in muscle memory, and they worked together to clear the Shinra Mansion, room by room. If it weren’t for the stunning red of Vincent’s cloak, the way his eyes flashed golden as they fought, this would almost feel familiar.

They swept the final room, and Vincent latched the door behind them once Veld gave the all-clear.

“I hope for all our sake that you have not taken another partner,” Vincent growled once the room was secured. “It will save me trouble of killing them for allowing you to come to this hellscape _alone_."

Veld couldn’t meet Vincent’s eyes. He glanced around the parlor room instead, taking in the dusty, elegant décor. There was a decanter of whiskey on the mantle. He blew dust from a crystal glass and poured a double with trembling hands.

“He doesn’t know I’m here,” he admitted finally.

“Still sending your help away when you’re in danger and need it the most?” Vincent asked. Veld wondered if he imagined the bitterness in his partner’s tone. He wasn’t as familiar with those subtle emotions of his, after so many years.

“This isn’t a mission,” Veld said without looking at him. “It’s personal. It isn’t Tseng’s duty to accompany me on private vendettas, and I certainly wasn’t going to risk losing anyone else to this _fucking_ mansion.” His hand shook around his whiskey glass, and he took a too-deep drink before refilling it and turning to face Vincent. His expression was obscured behind the cowl of the red cloak he wore, gaze focused somewhere off in the distance. A crimson headband halfheartedly tried to keep his hair from falling in his face. The length of his hair seemed the only way to measure the passing of time by looking at him. He looked even younger than Veld remembered, his apparent youth made more extreme in comparison with Veld’s age. 

“We should get a fire going,” Vincent said after a long moment of mutual discomfort. “It gets freezing in the mansion at night.”

Veld nodded, and for a while they went about the task of building a fire quietly. It wasn’t until Vincent was seated in front of the hearth, nursing the little flame to life, that he spoke.

“So,” Vincent began at last. “Is there someone in the picture? A wife? Kids? A—”

“No fucking way are you really trying to make small-talk,” Veld cut in, disbelieving. “You disappear for thirteen years only for me to find you in this hell-house sleeping in a coffin like something out of a fucking gothic novel and you ask me if I’m _seeing someone?”_

“Then say something,” Vincent whispered, and Veld caught the plea in his tone. Vincent trying to drag words out of _him_ , now that was something. How the tables had turned. He still wasn’t sure what to say. This all felt surreal.

“I thought you were dead,” he said at last, barely more than a whisper. “Yet, here you are.”

“Here I am,” Vincent confirmed solemnly.

“And I just have to wonder, if you aren’t dead, what excuse could you possibly have for _not contacting me?_ ” Veld demanded, struggling to contain his sudden surge of rage.

“Look at me, Veld,” commanded Vincent, finally looking up to meet his partner’s eyes. Vincent’s eyes were scarlet, eerily bright in the gloom of their small fire. “If the Shinra found out that I am still alive…I would never see freedom again.”

“What do the Shinra have to do with this?” Veld demanded. “Are you saying that whatever… _this_ ,” he gestured towards Vincent “is, was _sanctioned_?”

“Sanctioned?” Vincent shook his head. “No. The work of a company employee? Yes. And the product of said work could potentially be…incredibly _useful_ to a weapons company. You and I both know that Shinra has been more than happy to overlook matters as insignificant as ethics and sanctions in the past.”

“Who…” Veld began, but he cut himself off, freezing for an instant in realization. “Fucking Hojo,” he breathed.

“Fucking Hojo,” Vincent confirmed. He took a deep breath, and Veld couldn’t help but notice that it was shaky, just the slightest bit. “I can’t talk about this right now, Veld,” he apologized. “Still too much adrenaline from the fight. It’s…a bad idea.”

“Later,” Veld demanded.

“Later,” he affirmed.

“No more fucking small talk,” Veld warned, and Vincent nodded in agreement.

“Tell me about your partner,” Vincent said after a moment. “Tseng?” Veld shot a glare his way. “It isn’t small-talk. I deserve to know.”

“He,” Veld’s eyes shot over to Vincent, studying him in brief flashes. Somehow, Vincent had always aged alongside him in his imagination, years his partner hadn’t gotten to live etching laugh-lines on his face to match Veld’s own. It had allowed him to overlook just how much Tseng resembled him—raven-black hair, their faces fine-boned and elegant—but he couldn’t deny it now. They could have been brothers, twins, almost, with how little age difference there seemed to be between them.

“He reminds me a lot of you,” Veld admitted finally. Both of the men served in the same position on the team; quiet and collected counterweight to Veld’s brash countenance.

Vincent wanted to say more; Veld could see it in him, but he didn't. Veld wondered what he'd bit back. It could be anything, really, from _“I’m glad you have someone to keep you in line”_ to _“Do you fuck him too?”_ Veld found himself glad he didn't ask.

“Vincent fucking Valentine,” Veld breathed, a hysterical laugh bursting forth, unbidden. He wanted to hug him, but he couldn't bring himself to, not yet. He was afraid that touching him might shatter the dream. So he poured them both a glass of whiskey instead and motioned for Vincent to settle down near the fire.


	2. For All the Broken

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Vincent shows Veld his scars. Dark/graphic content in this one.  
> 

They were safe now, and alone, staring at one another in the light of the fire flickering in the hearth, and for a long while there was silence. Silence as the two men studied one another, as they contemplated the years that lay between them, everything that had happened, everything that changed…and everything that hadn’t.

Vincent’s eyes were luminous in the half-darkness of the room as he peered at Veld over the collar of that ridiculous cloak, unnerving in the way they caught the firelight like an animal’s, but still Vincent’s, still so undeniably Vincent’s. And that, he realized, was a good summation of the man who sat before him—unnerving, but still undeniably Vincent. He tried to see the Turk he remembered somewhere beneath it all—impeccably tidy in his navy suit, raven hair neatly trimmed and silken, always falling into eyes that had been more mahogany than scarlet, then—but he couldn’t.

But he could still see his friend, his brother…his partner. He could see the man he loved so dearly in the quiet concern in his eyes, could hear him in the care in that rumbling voice, in those rarely-spoken words, could sense him in those silent gestures only he could read—the ones that spoke volumes.

“Vincent,” he said softly, voice a whisper.

“Veld.”

“I missed you,” he admitted, reaching across the space between them to rest a hand on his partner’s knee. Vincent rested his hand atop Veld’s—the right one, the man couldn’t help but notice, even though he gripped his left knee. For an instant, his eyes flickered down to the clawed gauntlet that replaced his left hand, recalled the sight of that hand gripping the still-beating heart of a monster, way those scarlet eyes of his had flashed a similar shade of gold as they were fighting. He was still Vincent, yes, but also something… _else_.

“I missed you too,” Vincent rumbled back in the sort of tone that never failed to warm him.

“What did he do to you?” Veld whispered. Vincent’s eyes flickered away from his, and the hand that had been gripping his own curled into a fist. “You promised. You promised to tell me.”

Vincent closed his eyes. Tell him? How could he tell him? How could he put what had happened to him in words? The trauma poured back, unbidden, images and sensations flashing behind his eyes as he tried to string together what had happened to him into a narrative in his head.

_The crack of gunfire in his ears. He’d heard it before it felt it, fiery pain as the bullets tore through flesh. The taste of his own blood in his mouth, coppery and warm as it filled his lungs instead of air._

 _Watching the destruction of everything he held dear through the eerie green haze of the Mako tank, suspended somewhere between life and death, aching for one or the other to take him. Trapped in a nightmare, watching Lucrecia mourning him, the hate and terror in her eyes when she finally realized exactly what Hojo was. Lucrecia’s cries as she’d given birth, only half as awful as the noises she’d made after, begging Hojo for her son._ His son too, perhaps? The idea had always haunted him.

_The tugging sensation of a scalpel slicing through his flesh blooming into agony. The noise when Hojo cracked his ribs open. The pain and horror of that first transformation, bones breaking and rearranging, the demons screaming in his head…_

“I can’t,” he croaked at last, trying to shake the nightmares from his eyelids. “I can’t,” he whispered.

Unconsciously, Veld’s hand constricted on his knee. He had walked through hell with this man. They had seen things, done things together that would break most people. And Veld had watched Vincent smile while doing them, on those rare occasions he let the battle-lust take him. They had lost people, good people, people they had cared about, and they’d killed good people too. The idea that Vincent had faced something so terrible he couldn’t talk about it—the fact that he had faced it _alone…_ he felt his throat constrict.

“…Can you _show_ me?” he whispered at last, leaning forward to grasp Vincent’s left forearm—the metal one—in his hand. Crimson eyes darted down to the point of contact, and after a moment of silence so long Veld thought he wouldn’t reply, he nodded.

Standing, he unbuckled his cloak, letting the garment flutter to the floor. Trembling fingers found their way to the buckles of his shirt, but they faltered there, clawed gauntlet clumsy enough without the added anxiety.

“Let me,” Veld murmured, half command and half question, gently sweeping Vincent’s hands aside. The gunslinger didn’t resist, closing his eyes as his partner’s hands hesitantly worked at the complicated buckles of his shirt. Veld closed his eyes too, suddenly reluctant to see, not reopening them until he felt the leather shirt fall open.

“Fuck,” he breathed. Vincent opened his eyes long enough to see the pain flash across his partner’s face before closing them again. “Valentine…”

Calloused, familiar hands came to rest against his skin, shaking as they traced the “Y” shaped scar bisecting his torso. Veld couldn’t help but notice that Vincent flinched at the contact, and that, perhaps, ached more than anything. That scar was the worst, but there were others, and for a moment Veld made a mental catalog of them all. He’d spent years patching up his partner after missions; he knew every scar that was supposed to be there, and all the ones that weren’t. There…were a lot that weren’t.

He faltered again when he came to the gunshot wounds—one in the heart, two to the lungs, noted some small, detached part of his brain still capable of logical thought. There was no way they had missed. There was no way…

“These should have killed you.” Veld’s voice sounded wrong to his own ears, flat and toneless.

“They did.” Vincent turned his face as Veld’s eyes snapped up to his.

 ** _“What did he do to you?”_** A demand this time, not a request.

“He was experimenting on them, Lucrecia and the child,” Vincent began after a long while. “When I found out… I was furious. I didn’t know it was possible to be that angry, Veld. But Lu,” His eyes closed again, and his hands balled into fists. When his eyes opened, they glimmered gold. “She made me promise not to hurt him. So I left my gun. I knew that if I had it…I wouldn’t have been able to help myself.” A shuddering breath, in and out. “I was so **_stupid_** _._ ”

Veld flinched subtly when Vincent growled the word, his voice suddenly coming out two-toned. Anyone other than his partner would have missed the expression, but Vincent caught it, even after all of these years. He took a few deep breaths, wresting his self-control back from…something.

“It was my own fucking pistol,” he informed Veld, fingers moving to trace the puckered scar above his heart. He dipped his head, trying to hide his expression behind the cowl of his cloak out of habit before remembering it wasn’t there. “After that…my memories are…scattered,” _periods of blackness interspersed with agony._ “He…did things, to me.”

“What kind of things?” Veld whispered, not sure anymore that he wanted to know. But he needed to. He needed to know every horror Hojo had forced on the man that he loved so he could pay each one back in kind.

“Even I don’t know the full extent of it, all of the whys. There are files, somewhere, I’m sure…”

“Vincent,” Veld interrupted gently. He cut off and closed his eyes. When he opened them again, there was fire in them—not that alien gold glint—but a fury he was acquainted with, strangely comforting in its familiarity. 

“Why do you need to know, Veld?” he demanded, harsher than he intended. “Why do you need to know about the weeks I spent in that mako tank, not quite dead and painfully aware that I wasn’t alive? Do you really need to know what it’s like to be awake for your own autopsy? To feel your body rotting? Do you need to know how it felt when Hojo cracked my ribcage open? How it sounded?”

Veld bit off a small, choked sound, face snapping away from Vincent’s as he tried to blink away tears. The agony flared to anger quickly.

“Yes!” Veld roared, shoving his partner back a step before following closely and gripping the man by the collar of his unbuttoned shirt and yanking him closer. “Yes,” he repeated, the noise muffled into Vincent’s shoulder. “I need to know _every single thing_ he did to you, so I can do the same to him before I kill the fucker.”

“It won’t change anything, Verdot,” Vincent said calmly. “When his time comes, he will die, and though I’d much prefer it to be by my hand, I’ll accept his death gratefully no matter what form it takes.”

“How are you so calm!” Veld demanded, shoving Vincent again. This time, the man didn’t even sway, and Veld was suddenly aware that he had only been able to push him because he’d allowed him to. The thought was…uncomfortable, but he didn’t linger on it now. For now, this other change was more disturbing. Vincent had always been quiet, guarded, slow to slow emotion, but this… _hopeless acceptance_ was alien. Vincent didn’t give up the fight. Ever. He executed revenge as an art form.

Turning away from his partner again, Vincent closed his eyes and tried to keep the turmoil from showing on his face.

“Emotions are… dangerous for me, now. Mine is no longer the only voice in my head.”

“I…” Veld tried, but he had to choke the words back, knowing any attempt at speaking them would either send him spiraling into a pit of rage or despair. The tears overflowed, and he didn’t try to wipe them away. He stepped forward to embrace Vincent, one hand at his waist and the other trailing through the hair at the nape of his neck. Vincent stiffened at the contact, and Veld still hated it, remembering how much Vincent once loved being touched. Had he forgotten? Had the pain he’d lived through somehow chased away all of those happy memories? Then he would just have to remind him…

He had to stand on tiptoe a bit to kiss him. That was new, too. They had been closer to the same height…before, and his partner’s skin was too cool. But his lips…they felt so achingly, incredibly familiar against his own, full and soft as velvet. Vincent made a quiet noise somewhere low in his throat, and Veld gripped him tighter, fingers knotting in his hair. Vincent’s thumb came up to trace the outline of his jaw, and the cool metal of his gauntlet rested lightly against his shoulder blades.

Vincent broke the kiss first, but remained in Veld’s embrace, resting his chin on Veld’s head as his partner buried his face against his shoulder.

“I’m not the man I used to be,” Vincent whispered into his hair, an apology or a warning, Veld wasn’t sure. 

“And do those…voices in your head have anything to do with that?”

“Yes,” he croaked.

“Vincent,” Veld began quietly, trying to gather both the words and the courage to ask him. Vincent sighed.

“I can hear your heartbeat,” he murmured, not meeting Veld’s eyes as they rose to his face. He knew that if he did, he wouldn’t be able to continue. “I can smell the blood from that cut you weren’t going to tell me about. I’ve lived through things that should have killed me, and after…after he finished doing what he did, none of those things left a scar. I’m not… _human_ anymore, Veld.”

“The voices?” Veld pressed in a choked whisper.

“Demons,” he answered curtly. This…more than anything, this was the part he didn’t want to talk about. The other things—the regeneration, the enhanced senses, the scars, even the reason for that fucking gauntlet—those were all things Hojo had done to his _body_. They hurt, but he could live with them. But those monsters in his head? They had changed _him_. “I can take their shapes, use them, and…sometimes….” He took a deep breath, letting it out in a shudder, and Veld gripped him tighter, sensing his pain. “Sometimes if I’m not careful _they_ use _me_. They’re always there, waiting for the chance.”

Vincent finally met his partner’s eyes, reading the sadness in them, the pain. And lingering behind that, worse than anything else—guilt.

“Don’t you dare,” he growled quietly. “Don’t you dare think of blaming yourself for this, even for a second.”

“I never should have sent you there,” Veld said miserably. “I never should have let you out of my sight.”

“Veld,” Vincent tried, but the man cut over him, tears coming again, voice inching closer to a shout.

“Fuck, Valentine; I sent you away because I wanted you to be _safe_. I didn’t want you mixed up in the shit Shinra’s doing in Midgar. It was supposed to be an _easy_ mission! Babysit some scientists in the middle of fucking nowhere, shoot a few Nibel wolves maybe! And you somehow go and get yourself _killed_ …” His voice broke.

“My failure is _not_ your fault,” Vincent said sternly. He had expected Veld to argue. He _hadn’t_ expected the man to hit him. Veld’s fist caught him hard—a blow to the jaw that snapped his head to the side. It probably would have knocked him down, once.

“Your failure?!” Veld roared. “Your _failure?_! One of your charges fucking _shot_ you!”

“You still say ‘fuck’ too much when you’re angry, you know,” Vincent tried lightly, spitting out blood from where he’d bitten his tongue.

“ _Fuck_ you!” Veld swung again, but this time Vincent dodged the blow neatly, stepping in closer to wrap his arms around the man’s torso, half-embrace and half-restraint. Galian Beast stirred in his head, alerted by the adrenaline in his system and the scent of fresh blood, but the demon quieted when Veld broke, going limp in his arms and sobbing helplessly into his chest. This wasn’t the first time he’d seen his partner cry, but it was the first time he’d ever seen him cry like this—ugly and with abandon. After a moment, he realized that he was the only thing holding the man up, and he gently lowered both of them to the floor, Veld half in his lap. He stroked his wavy brown hair lightly with his gauntleted hand, achingly aware of his claws. He held him close with the human one. He held him until the man ran out of tears, until his shoulders stopped shaking and his breathing slowed. Veld pulled back just enough to wipe his face clean.

“I haven’t cried like that since…since your funeral,” he whispered, voice a wreck.

“I’m so sorry, Veld,” Vincent murmured.

“I’m sorry too.”


	3. I Use You Like A Tourniquet

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Suggested listening: "Jaws" by Sleep Token https://open.spotify.com/track/2GPdGwBnFfruzFbJPd7uQS

There was silence as Veld's tears slowly dried, Vincent never releasing him from his embrace. Veld moved more cautiously the next time, giving Vincent a chance to reject him this time as he sought his lips. Vincent leaned down to meet them, sighing into the kiss. Veld still smelled like gunpowder and tobacco, and he breathed it in deeply, the scent warm and comforting. The beard was new—new like the scar that marred his left cheek, like the laugh-lines around his eyes—but he liked the way it tickled as Veld pulled back to catch his breath and Vincent pressed his lips to the man’s jaw. He still tasted the way he remembered, too, Vincent noticed as he licked into his mouth, like black coffee and cheap cigars. And his hands…those hands were so achingly familiar, calloused and blunt-fingered and warm as they cupped his cheek, trailed down the skin of his neck…as they skimmed over the knotted scar where Lucrecia had placed the protomateria in his chest.

Vincent cringed and drew away instinctively. Veld didn’t try to hold him there, just looked up at him for a while with sad brown eyes. And that may have been the worst of it, Vincent decided at last, the worst thing Hojo had done to him—making it impossible, after all of the years they’d spent apart, to enjoy his partner’s touch. Every caress reminded him of the pain, the failure, made him feel dirty.

“You have nothing to be ashamed of, Vin,” Veld whispered at last. Vincent didn’t reply to that. He didn’t want to argue, not now. “How many of these scars did I stitch for you, hm?” Veld continued after a while, reaching out to trace a familiar mark on his partner’s shoulder. “Do you think a few more would bother me?”

He was being nonchalant, disingenuous, irritatingly so. Both of them knew that the scars from those experiments weren’t like the others. Those scars were something monstrous, represented something monstrous, made him _look_ like something monstrous. But still, Veld pressed on, leaning forward to brush his lips across the scar his fingers had traced a moment earlier.

“This one’s from that riot in Sector Five,” he murmured against the mark. “Bullshit, that. We never should have gotten caught up in it.”

“I told you the arrest wouldn’t go over well,” Vincent replied. “People grow attached to their revolutionaries.” Veld merely let out a hum against his skin, not debating the point.

“This one,” lips moving to a puckered spot just below Vincent’s collarbone, “is from a gunshot wound. Your first, right? You cursed like a motherfucker when I pulled the bullet out. Really. Even _I_ was impressed.”

That one drew a chuckle out of Vincent—more a huff of air than anything, barely there, but there nonetheless. He reached up and pushed Vincent’s shirt off his shoulders, slowly and gently letting it slide to the floor. Veld couldn't help but notice the way he shuddered as the fabric glided over his skin. For someone with such a high pain tolerance, he'd always been so astonishingly sensitive. The next wound he traced was a bad one, a long, jagged cut from wrist to the inside of his elbow.

“This one is from that little punk who ambushed us at the reactor. The one with the bad mullet, remember? There was so much blood…His partner had me, and I thought we were fucked. You were bleeding so much, and there were so many of them.” Veld smiled at him a little, and Vincent saw want in his eyes. “That was the first time I’d ever seen you lose yourself to the battle-lust. It was…beautiful,”

_Vincent, eyes glinting, pale skin gleaming in the eerie light of the mako, smiling as he took out the entire rebel unit alone, something predatory in his expression, something Veld hadn’t seen there before. Veld had kissed the blood spatter off his face, after. They’d slept together for the first time that night. It was the first time they had come so close to losing one another, the first time they both realized how incapable each one of them was of letting the other go._

“ _You_ were beautiful.” He brought his hands to Vincent’s face again, made the taller man meet his eyes. “You still are. Let me show you.”

Vincent let out a shuddering breath. Veld took it as an invitation. He continued for what felt like forever, tracing each and every battle scar he’d stitched closed with his mouth, occasionally murmuring a story that went with one against his skin. Vincent’s breathing was growing uneven, and Veld couldn’t help but be painfully aware of how his body—how both their bodies—were responding to this.

“I almost forgot,” Veld lied, pushing gently but insistently against Vincent’s chest until the man leaned back on his elbows, “about this one.” He traced Vincent’s hipbone before his fingers went to the laces of his pants, loosening them just enough to slide them down a few inches, revealing the scar at the very top of his pelvis. He steadied himself against Vincent’s chest as he leaned down, intentionally placing his hand over those bullet wounds, pleased that Vincent was too focused on what his other hand was doing to flinch at the contact. He ran the rough pad of his thumb over the mark before bringing his lips to it and kissing hard, nipping at the sensitive skin as he did. Vincent gasped, barely loud enough to hear, head tipping back, and Veld let his lips linger. His partner breathed out a curse in Wutain, equally at the edge of hearing.

“What was that?” Veld hummed satisfactorily. He sounded almost as breathless as Vincent, he couldn’t help but notice. His partner closed his eyes and took a deep breath, followed it with a few more.

“A bed, Verdot. I won’t do this on the floor.” A smile split Veld’s face, and warmth bloomed low in his belly.

“You always have been so infuriatingly prudish,” he teased. Vincent gave him a look, one he knew too well, one eyebrow quirked just the slightest bit, judgement written across his face, the barest hint of a smile curling his lips. For anyone else, the same message would probably have been conveyed with an eyeroll, but that was too dramatic for Vincent. He turned on heel, cool and matter-of-fact, and started leading Veld down one of the long hallways, searching for a room that might be safe from memories. He settled on a small room near the end of the hallway—servant’s quarters, probably—sparsely furnished with a full-sized bed and matching dresser.

“We can take this as slow as you need,” Veld assured him gently as he placed his palms on Vincent’s shoulders, calloused hands trailing gently up and down his arms as he pressed his face into Vincent’s hair and breathed him in.

Gods, it had been so long. He hadn’t been touched like this since…since Lucrecia. He closed his eyes and tried to force the thought away. He would not think of her now, would not have her ghost intrude on this moment. _Veld,_ he reminded himself firmly. _This is Veld._

He needed to think of something else, and he searched for another memory to ground himself in. He reached back into the past and tried to wrap himself in Veld, called up memories of the last time the man had touched him. 

_They were sitting on the sofa in Vincent’s sparse apartment, Vincent wine-drunk to that point somewhere between melancholy and reflective. Veld was more than a few drinks into the evening himself, and when he leaned in to kiss Vincent, he tasted like whiskey._

_“Fuck you, Veld,” Vincent said coolly when Veld finally pulled back from the embrace. Veld couldn’t read anything in the dark-haired man’s face, but he knew he was upset. Vincent rarely cursed when he wasn’t, especially not at him._

_“Please, Vin… not tonight,” Veld murmured against his shoulder. “It’s—”_

_“It wouldn’t be our last night if you weren’t sending me away,” Vincent cut in, the bitterness in his voice so well-concealed that anyone other than Veld would have missed it._

_“Look,” Veld said, turning his body so they were fully facing one another before leaning forward, staring intently into Vincent’s eyes. “l’m worried, all right, about some of the things the company is doing. It’s entirely possible that the next few months might be…turbulent, here in Midgar. They’re grabbing at power, political power—”_

_“I should be here,” Vincent interrupted, fire creeping into his voice. “I’m your partner, Veld. We look out for one another. Do you really think that I would let you walk into this alone?”_

_“I do, and you will,” Veld said firmly. “I don’t want you involved in this.”_

_“I am a Turk,” Vincent said flatly. “It is my job to be involved in this.”_

_“It is your job to complete assignments, and your assignment is in Nibelheim.”_

_They glared at one another for a moment, Veld using all his willpower to keep from flinching under the weight of his partner’s mahogany stare. For all of his gentleness, all of his care, when Vincent looked at someone that way he was like a predator seeking out weakness in his prey. The slightest flicker of it was all it would take for his partner to rip his throat out, metaphorically speaking…he hoped. At last, Vincent released him, turning away to pour himself another glass of red wine. Veld sighed, reaching out to rest a hand on his thigh._

_“I came here to say goodbye,” he pleaded gently, leaning in. “I know you’re angry with me, but…Vincent, please.”_

_Vincent drained his wineglass and shoved Veld back with force, pinning his body to the arm of the sofa with his own. Their lips crashed together, frantic, violent, Vincent tugging at Veld’s lips with his teeth, fingers knotting tightly in his hair, halfway between pleasure and pain. He ripped Veld’s shirt open, neither of them reacting as a few buttons fell to the floor in the process. Vincent straddled Veld’s waist, breaking away from the kiss to slip off his own shirt. Veld grabbed Vincent by the hips as he straightened, leaving Veld’s face suddenly level with the laces of his pants._

_They both seemed to realize this at the same time, Veld’s eyes flashing up to Vincent’s as Vincent’s fingers curled tightly into his hair, holding him there._

_“You know what to do,” Vincent growled. Veld gave a nod, a bit more solemnly than he meant to. He did know what to do, knew what Vincent needed, and why he needed it. What he needed more than anything right now was control, and he was searching for it here now that it had seemingly abandoned every other facet of his life._

_Dutifully, he tugged at the laces of Vincent’s pants with his teeth, working the fabric until the man’s erection finally sprang free. Veld wrapped his mouth around him, and Vincent moaned at the contact, hips bucking. This was Vincent’s area of expertise, he lamented as his head bobbed between the other man’s thighs. It wasn’t that he was clumsy; he always managed to bring partners to neat, efficient orgasms when the situation necessitated, and he’d never had a complaint, but he wasn’t a patient man. Vincent was. While Veld merely viewed this as foreplay, a necessary precursor that required less attention than the main event, every moment was important to Vincent. Vincent had the patience to break a man apart with his mouth, with those strong, slender hands of his. Veld regretted not being a better study as he sucked Vincent to completion, but his partner didn’t seem to mind. Veld let out a satisfied moan of his own at Vincent’s cries._

_He tried to push Vincent back into the cushions, reaching for the vial of oil he kept in the side table, but he resisted. Vincent liked it rough sometimes—after an argument, or a particularly bloody battle. He liked to make Veld fight for it, at least until he was trembling with need and ready to submit. Their relationship felt too much like a sparring match, sometimes, in more ways than one._

_He pushed Vincent harder, or tried to, at least, but Vincent had dodged under his arms with ease, using his weight and a particularly effective grappling move to send the both of them tumbling to the carpet…_

It would have looked like brawling, to anyone else, two alley cats battling for dominance. For them, it was foreplay, at least when their blood was racing. He used to wonder, sometimes, if it was just them, or if it was simply a Turk thing, a product of living life on such a razor’s edge—sex and violence and death converging into a single vice, a single source of pleasure, mixed and muddled.

Not that Veld was incapable of being gentle. He was gentle now, in fact, careful; careful not to make any sudden movements, careful not to linger too long on the worst of his scars. He led Vincent to the bed, but didn’t push him down on the mattress like he wanted to, just broke off the embrace and sat down on the edge of the bed, waiting for Vincent to join him. He hesitated only a little before climbing in next to him, and Veld tried to take that as a good sign.

Vincent sighed into Veld’s next kiss, half pleasure and half exasperation. Veld was treating him like a virgin bride on their wedding night, and though that thought filled him with more annoyance than amusement, he hated to admit to himself that it was necessary. It was…painful, letting another person touch him, even Veld, familiar as his touch was, skilled as he was at distracting him from his demons. He had always been good at that, though the skill had been less literal, once.

Veld always seemed to know what he needed anytime he began to teeter too close to the edge, whether that be an outlet to express his violent tendencies or someone to tenderly break him apart, bit by bit. But he was faltering now.

There was an awkwardness to him that was alien to his partner, though Vincent wasn’t sure what had caused it. Was he simply more uncomfortable with the changes to his body than he’d expressed? Was he still unsure whether or not he was bedding a monster? Was it fear? Did he resent him, for Lucrecia?

Or was he simply afraid to hurt him? Afraid that any careless misstep could bring back trauma he never wanted the man he loved to have to face? Did he simply not know what he needed? Vincent wasn’t even sure he knew that himself.

He deepened the kiss, fingers knotting into Veld’s hair, teeth tugging at his lower lip. Veld’s fingers tightened instinctively, digging into one of the new scars he’d been trying so hard to avoid, and it felt…good, almost, as he bit Veld’s lip harder in response, drawing a low moan out of the man.

“You are treating me like glass, Veld,” Vincent whispered against his skin. “You couldn’t break me now, even if you tried.”

“Oh?” Veld murmured. “Is that a challenge?”

Vincent’s long, pale fingers trailed across the skin of his chest, and the cold metal of his gauntlet made Veld shiver as he traced clawed fingers up his arm. That hand came to rest on his throat, tilted his head back, claws pressed hard enough against his flesh to cause the slightest pressure, but not hard enough to break skin. Vincent leaned in close, and Veld shuddered at the scrape of teeth against his earlobe when the other man spoke.

“… _Yes,”_ he growled quietly. “I need,” he drew a shaky breath. “I need to remember that pain can feel… _good_.”

Veld froze for a moment, unable to hide his obvious reaction to those words, a shudder running down the length of his spine. He swallowed, and looked at Vincent intently.

“Are you sure?” he asked seriously, holding the other man’s eyes. Vincent thought for a moment. He could turn back now, and Veld wouldn’t hold it against him. He _wanted_ this, with an urgency that ached, but he wasn’t sure his body was ready for it. He wasn’t sure a misplaced touch, a noise, a smell, might not send him into the grips of his demons, figuratively and literally. “Vincent?” he said, quieter, seeing the hesitation in his partner’s eyes. He shuddered. Breathed deep. Banished his fears.

 _I have survived Hell,_ he reminded himself. _I_ _have survived torture. I have even survived Death. I am a world-class gunslinger. I am a Weapon; a Turk, a monster. I can rip men apart with my claws. I am Hellmasker, and Death Gigas. I am Galian Beast. I am Chaos, the end of all things. I am Vincent fucking Valentine, and I will not fear being touched by a man I love_.

He fisted his hand in Veld’s hair—the sensitive part, right behind his ear—and twisted until he bent his ear towards him. Veld shuddered when Vincent leaned in to speak to him, lips brushing the shell of his ear, and Vincent’s voice came out two-toned on the reply.

“ ** _Try to break me, Veld_**.”


	4. (Blood is) Sweet as Cherry Wine

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Again, things get explicit. Check the tags, folks. I've added new ones.

Veld froze at the words, brain struggling to process the sounds, though his body had interpreted them clearly enough, lightning shooting through his nerves, cock going abruptly, painfully hard in the suddenly suffocating confines of his wool slacks.

“ _What_?” Veld muttered dumbly.

Vincent shoved him with more force than he’d meant to, and his head almost hit the wall by the headboard instead of landing on the pillow where Vincent wanted it. Vincent crawled onto the bed after him, bracketing Veld’s hips with slender thighs and leaning forward to whisper in his ear.

“Try to break me,” Vincent repeated, his voice only his own now, but…gods, had it always been so _low_ , so husky? Veld let out a shuddering breath. It had been so _long_ , but this was still so gods-damned familiar, so… _easy_. So comfortable, like it was the most natural thing in the world.

“That’s what I fucking thought you said,” Veld breathed darkly, catching Vincent by the shoulders before he could sit up, twisting slightly to throw his weight off-center and send him toppling to the mattress.

He was on top of Vincent before he moved again, pinning his arms down at the elbows and settling in his lap. He caught Vincent’s lips and kissed them _hard_ , the way he’d wanted to since they’d been reunited, the way he’d wanted to every day for the past two decades, claiming him with teeth and tongue, hungry and possessive. With his legs spread his pants were even more constrictive, the pressure leaving him desperate for friction. So desperate that he actually gasped as Vincent’s hand—the clawed one—cupped him there lightly, gasped like a gods-damned schoolgirl at a fucking naughty touch. His mind blanked, just for an instant, but long enough for Vincent to see him defenseless and send him tumbling off the bed with a shove that left him mildly winded. Vincent was on him before he’d fully managed to gain his feet, surging against him like a tidal wave, shoving Veld backwards until he crashed against the wall. Vincent pressed against him, pinning him with his body. He was too skinny, Veld noted as Vincent’s hipbones pressed sharply into his stomach. They jutted out enough to leave a small gap between his stomach and the waistband of his pants, Veld saw as Vincent pulled away a bit. He reached his hands forward to hook his fingers in the space, but Vincent caught them, forcing them up and pinning Veld’s arms over his head. Veld laughed, the sound gravely and breathy.

“So we’re playing _this_ game then?,” he said softly, teasingly. Three decades of smoking had finally taken their toll on his voice, leaving an unfamiliar, husky rasp there that was the absolute opposite of unpleasant. “No gentle reunion sex, no crying in my arms while I fuck you?”

Veld’s hips tilted forward, searching for the friction of Vincent’s thigh. His eyes fluttered closed when he found it, but one of Vincent’s hands—the human one, this time—left his wrists in order to press his hips against the wall, depriving him of the pressure. He couldn’t move. Not an inch, not an inch from where Vincent’s hand rested on his stomach, holding his hips back, to the place where Vincent’s claws pinned his wrists to the wall like manacles. He didn’t weigh enough for this to be possible. Veld must have had at least thirty pounds on him now, most of it hard muscle despite his age, but still he couldn’t move.

 _What the fuck did Hojo do to you?_ He couldn’t help but think again, even as being pinned like this, completely and utterly at the mercy of Vincent’s improbable strength, had his face flushing with heat. It scared him, he had to admit, and he mused vaguely that the fear was probably also the reason it turned him on so damn much. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d been afraid.

He wasn’t going to lie to himself. A part of him, a very large part of him, wanted to go limp in Vincent’s embrace and let the man take him. But it wasn’t what Vincent needed, and he owed him this—happiness, or at least as close a thing that existed to it, now—only if for a night.

“Do you want me to touch you?” Vincent rumbled in his ear. Veld, despite all his intention to take the lead, found himself nodding helplessly. Vincent moved the hand that had been resting on his stomach to Veld’s face, the soft leather of his glove trailing over his lips. “Then help me with this.”

Humming, Veld took the tip of the glove’s middle finger into his teeth and tugged. He alternated between fingertips as he worked, tugging it a little further off each time, until, at long last, it dropped to the floor. Suddenly gentle, Vincent paused to trace the lines of Veld’s face with his fingertips, and his chocolate eyes closed at the touch. He shuddered a little in anticipation, entirely too aware of what those fingers were capable of.

Veld had always admired them, his hands, long before the other man had ever touched him with them. Before they were partners, even. The first time he’d noticed them, Vincent had just graduated academy. _He’d been lounging in the breakroom in his crisp new navy suit, rolling a coin over his knuckles while holding a slender paperback in his other hand, and Veld had just stared at him, watching those long, slender fingers dance as he played with his coin. He had paused to turn the page, and that was when he’d noticed Veld._ Vincent had given him a _look_ , one Veld couldn’t read then but recognized in hindsight as bemusement. It had prompted their first conversation as colleagues.

_“This is usually the part where you either say something or stop staring,” Vincent had said nonchalantly, sending the coin into motion again. Usually, that kind of reply, especially from someone younger than him, some rookie fresh from academy, would have earned a snarky retort at the least. A fist, maybe, on a bad day._

_“I just wanted to introduce myself,” he’d said instead. Vincent gave him that look again. “You’re Valentine, right? I’m—”_

_“Veld,” Vincent finished for him. “I know.”_

_It should have been the final straw, his cue to either withdraw or bite back, fight or flight. The kid was a rookie—a snarky little rookie, talking over him, using his first name—why wasn’t Veld putting a stop to it? Instead…_

_“You want a coffee?” Veld had almost hit himself for asking._

_“We’re out of sugar.”_

Sugar _in his fucking coffee. And somehow Veld even managed to forgive him for that, though he finally couldn’t contain the jibe._

_“Oh, sorry, princess. I’ll make sure we stock up on the whipped cream and chocolate syrup for you as well,” Veld had teased, pouring himself a cup of coffee from the pot._

_“That would be incredibly thoughtful of you,” Vincent had replied, dead-pan._

Their first conversation had lasted thirty seconds. Veld was fairly certain he was in love. And all that time he’d watched Vincent play with that coin, mesmerized by his pale, pretty hands. He’d learned not long after that when they’d been deployed together for the first time, before they were partners, that Vincent wore gloves, well…pretty much always. It had become a secret game of his to make note of the times he had seen him without— _cooking in the breakroom of the Shinra Building, bending down on a quiet sidewalk to pet a stray cat, washing blood from his wrists in the sink of some bathroom, his gloves set to the side, freshly cleaned and drying. That one time, in the abandoned church, that Vincent had sat down at the bench and began to play the piano, and Veld was helplessly entranced as his fingers danced across the keys, certain and graceful and…_

Veld gasped and closed his eyes, head tipping towards the ceiling in hopes that it might hide his expression. There was moisture pooling at the corners of his eyes, and he tried to bite back the tears before they could fall, before Vincent could see them. He shivered a little at the cold contact of Vincent’s metal gauntlet at his wrists, realizing that if that gauntlet meant what he thought it did, Vincent would never play piano again. He thought of the old Grand in the parlor of the mansion, wondered if Vincent had tried…

Pain brought clarity back, and he recalled exactly what he had been tasked with doing here. Fuck, couldn’t he do _anything_ right? Since when had he ever struggled to have rough sex? If anything, his difficulties had always been the other way around. _He’s too fucking strong,_ a voice in his head whispered, anger and grief and arousal all bottled up into one. And Vincent was. There was no way Veld was going to manage to overpower him with sheer strength. Vincent was too strong. But Vincent was also rusty, and Veld was a Turk, one who had spent the past decade and a half on duty instead of sleeping in a coffin.

He slipped Vincent’s grip easily enough. He didn’t have to hurt either of them to do it, not even a little. As he’d suspected, Vincent was too worried about accidentally cutting him on that gauntlet to chase his wrists. The takedown he used was a simple thing, one Vincent really should have seen coming as he slid forward to place one leg between Vincent’s and sweep his left leg out from under him, twisting to lower both of them to the ground, Veld on top. He placed one knee on Vincent’s groin as he leaned down to kiss him, pressing _just_ hard enough to edge at pain.

“You should have seen that from a mile away, Valentine,” Veld chided, nipping at Vincent’s lower lip.

“Mmm,” Vincent replied. Veld laughed breathlessly, nibbling at his earlobe, one hand slipping down to the buttons of Vincent’s pants. “The bed,” Vincent reminded him firmly. Veld sputtered.

“ _You’re_ the one that _put us_ here _,_ asshole!” Veld exclaimed in indignation.

“ _I_ put us against the wall,” Vincent pointed out, in a calm, smug tone that made Veld want to strangle him. Instead, he pressed a little harder against the swell of his cock. That shut him up, sent his eyes flickering closed, chin tipping upwards just the slightest bit. The moan Vincent let out sent a stab of need through his gut.

“You know what I think?” Veld asked rhetorically in a husky whisper. “I think that you asked me to break you, and that I can do that just as well right here on the floor as I can in the bed.”

Once again, Vincent sent Veld flying off of him. It was an awkward throw, his legs pinned too effectively to be useful, forcing him just to use his arms, and he sent Veld tumbling straight back, landing hard on his ass with a grunt. When Veld found his feet, Vincent was standing already, studying him with the barest hint of a smile.

“You thought it would be that easy?” he asked in a tone so sincere Veld absolutely knew he was teasing him. “You still have all of your _clothes_ on,” he pointed out.

“Then I guess you’ll just have to take them off me,” Veld said with a grin, stepping forward to crowd into Vincent’s space. Vincent pulled him closer by his belt loops before unbuckling Veld’s belt and casting it aside.

“Who the hell wears a tie off-duty, Verdot?” Vincent murmured against his lips, fumbling at the knot for a moment before he managed to loosen the thing. The buttons of his shirt were easier. He’d unbuttoned his shirt one-handed plenty of times before, when his other hand had been…otherwise occupied. He pushed the shirt and blazer off the other man’s shoulders, letting them drop unceremoniously to the dusty floor. He usually would have complained about this, grumbled something about steaming out wrinkles being bad for the fabric, but he didn’t even seem to register it today, stepping forward in attempt to wrangle Vincent towards the bed. Vincent moved his foot away automatically, determined not to end up on the floor again. What had begun as shuffling quickly melded into some strange mimicry of _katas_ , their movements fueled by mutual fighting forms ingrained into them through years of sparring. Veld was expecting it when Vincent tried to grapple him once they reached the bed, and he took a step back out of range before Vincent could even move.

In the brief instant it took for Vincent to change his momentum and steady himself, Veld stepped forward and rammed his head into Vincent’s stomach, just below his rib cage. His breath left him in a huff, and Veld took another step forward, grabbing his thigh, levering his other leg against the side of the mattress, until Vincent finally tumbled back over onto the bed on his stomach. Veld didn’t relent this time, quickly climbing on top and putting him into a hold that would be a challenge to break without dislocating something, even with his strength. He leveraged Vincent’s hands behind his back and crossed his wrists, struggling a little to hold him in place as he busied his own hands with…something. It wasn’t until he turned to try to look at Veld and his hair fell across his face, unrestrained, that he realized what the man was doing.

“Veld—” he began, just as the bonds tightened around his wrists. He tugged at them experimentally, realizing that they were anchored to the headboard.

“Careful,” Veld warned teasingly. “You don’t want to ruin that pretty red bandanna of yours, do you?”

Veld paused for a moment then and took his weight off of Vincent, gently tugging at the man in order to get him to roll over. Once Vincent was on his back, he gently brushed aside the hair obscuring his vision so he could meet his eyes.

“Is this okay?” he asked seriously, gesturing towards the restraints. After the briefest pause, Vincent nodded. “Are you sure? You could break that hold if you really needed to, and of course I can stop whenever you feel—”

“Veld,” Vincent interrupted fondly, visibly relaxing into the bonds. A warm smile graced his face, gently curling his lips and bringing a squinting glimmer to his eyes. “It’s okay. I know.”

Veld pulled away for a moment to finish undressing, slipping off his socks and loafers before finally, blessedly, freeing himself from his trousers and joining Vincent back in bed. He nudged Vincent’s thighs with his knee, and he spread his legs compliantly, letting Veld settle between them to kiss him.

“You’re the one who’s good at this,” Veld lamented, nipping at the shell of Vincent’s ear. “But you begged me to break you, and this is the only other way I know how. Gods know it breaks _me_ every time you do it.”

Veld kissed his temple, trailed his lips down the side of his face, down the long line of his nose. He ghosted along the outer edge of Vincent’s lips before catching Vincent’s bottom lip between his teeth and biting hard. The noise Vincent makes almost has Veld unhinged, a sweet keen right on that fine line between pleasure and pain he liked to blur so. When Veld kissed him afterwards, he tasted blood, and both of their mouths were red with it when Veld finally pulled away. His lips continued their path down Vincent’s body, trailing crimson. He peppered Vincent’s neck with kisses, broken up by a few sharp nibbles to the sensitive skin of his throat. Vincent bucked against him, but he rearranged his weight until he was pinning the smaller man’s legs down with his own, not allowing him to search for relief. He continued to kiss a pathway down his chest, lingering over any unmarked patch of skin he could find, sucking hickies, biting bruises. He paused for a moment to take in Vincent’s face. His pupils were so blown they almost hid the scarlet of his eyes, heavy-lidded with lust. His lips were crimson with his own blood. Fuck, he was beautiful.

Vincent’s skin smelled too much like cedar, but it tasted the way he remembered, sweet and earthy. He shuddered as Veld’s nose brushed a line between his hipbones. His fingers went to the buttons of Vincent’s pants. He tried to finish undressing him slowly, quaking hands lingering over the closures, but it was growing hard to be patient through the haze of his lust. He tugged his pants down, teeth savagely claiming the skin of his inner thigh, trying to ignore the hot and heavy swell of Vincent’s erection. Vincent struggled a little against his bonds when Veld started biting the thin skin around his groin, his fingers desperate to knot in the other man’s hair, to urge him on, and he let out another little noise, half-whine and half growl as he closed his eyes in frustration, his hips bucking a little despite Veld’s weight settled on them. Still, he couldn’t find relief, cock neglected and painfully hard now in the open air. Every so often, when Veld leaned forward, the other man’s length brushed against his own, hot and pulsating, and he was pretty sure he might actually die soon if Veld didn’t touch him. He was fairly certain that was impossible now, but this would be the death of him if anything was.

“Please,” he begged finally in a whisper, and he felt Veld’s lips curl into a satisfied smile against his skin. “ _Veld_.”

“Please what?” he whispered huskily. Vincent whined and squirmed again in response, and Veld chuckled. He wasn’t far behind him, mind reeling, lust-dazed. Trying to form a coherent thought made him feel like his mind was trudging through molasses. Still he didn’t touch him.

“ _Please_ ,” he choked again, arching into Veld, head tipping back onto the pillows.

“Tell me what you need me to do to you,” Veld commanded, and Vincent hummed another moan.

“I need you to fuck me,” he breathed in desperation, his voice a dark, needy thing.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay, so I am so, so sorry for doing this to you all...again. This chapter just kind of ran away with me and got too long. This is going to end up being six chapters instead of four, because obviously I can't leave you with (yet another) terrible cliff-hanger, and these boys are gonna need some after-care.


	5. Honey, you're Familiar Like my Mirror Years Ago

The sound that Vincent made as Veld wrapped his mouth around the head of his cock was _heavenly_ , and Veld never wanted to stop hearing that noise. He dug his thumbnails hard into the inside of Vincent’s thighs when he bucked his hips, punishing him for the movement, and Vincent moaned again. Veld could taste the salt of his precum in his mouth. He hadn’t seen Vincent so undone by so little stimulation, so gloriously wrecked by the faintest touch, since… _gods_ …since their first time, all those years ago. Veld held two fingers to Vincent’s mouth, and he took them inside obediently, sucking wetly for a moment before Veld pulled his hand free. He lowered his fingers to Vincent’s entrance, circling the rim a few times.

As Veld pressed a finger inward, Vincent’s mind fell blessedly silent for the first time in thirteen years. He had forgotten that anything could feel so _good_. A second finger followed the first soon after; Veld struggled to remain patient at the best of times, much less when his mind was muddied with need and the last shreds of his self-control were hanging by a thread. He pulled back a moment to discreetly pop his aching jaw; he was out of practice. He didn’t let it stop him, though, letting his tongue linger briefly over the slit at the head before taking him as deeply as he could. It wasn’t quite as deeply as Veld would have liked, but Vincent didn’t seem to mind as his partner hooked his fingers and found that spot that made him see stars.

“ _Vel_ ,” he gasped in warning, and Veld gave a tiny nod of affirmation, humming his assent. That little vibration was all it took to send Vincent over the edge, the warmth pooling low in his stomach condensing into molten lava before releasing itself in a flow of ecstasy. Veld slipped a third finger into Vincent as he swallowed down the salty bitterness of his release.

 _“Fuck!”_ Vincent keened breathlessly, overstimulation making his mind blank, the electricity racing down his spine scattering his thoughts into white noise. It was too much, that perfect mix of pleasure and pain, and it had him growing hard again almost immediately, even before the taste of his own semen faded from Veld’s lips as they kissed.

“Take these off,” Vincent demanded breathlessly, tugging gently at his bonds. Veld complied, immediately but easily, unhurriedly. He knew Vincent was asking out of a desire to touch him, not discomfort, and he enjoyed teasing him a moment longer Vincent pressed quaking kisses to his throat as he worked. When Veld finally finished, Vincent sat up, pulling Veld into his lap, fingers trailing along the line of his spine. Veld smiled and lowered his fingers again before pausing.

“Fuck,” he spat.

“What is it?” Vincent murmured, eyes still closed.

“It’s not like--” Veld choked a little. “It’s not like I came here prepared for _this_. Fuck. You’re _dead_ , remember? I don’t have any oil, or—”

“It’s all right,” Vincent assured him gently.

“Are you sure? I don’t want to hurt you.”

Vincent smiled—a little, wicked thing.

“Come, Veld,” he hummed, scarlet eyes glinting in the dim light. “The both of us know some days I like a little bit of pleasure with my pain.” Veld’s breath came out shaky then, whatever was left of his self-control shattering. As soon as he regained control of his muscles, he promised himself, he was going to rut this man like a bitch in heat.

“If you want me to stop, say something, otherwise I’m going to fucking tear you apart,” Veld said shakily. Vincent just moaned and arched his back, the soft, slender fingers of his right hand knotting in Veld’s hair. “Okay,” Veld whispered.

Vincent whimpered at the feeling of Veld’s tip pressing against his entrance, warm and eager, wet with saliva, some, but taking it would _hurt_. He welcomed it. Agony and ecstasy bloomed within Vincent in equal measures when Veld forced his cock inside the tight, warm velvet of his hole. Veld didn’t pause, not giving Vincent time to adjust before he began thrusting, burying himself a little deeper each time until, at last, he found himself engulfed in that familiar heat. Vincent found his hands fisting helplessly in the sheets as he moaned, warm and blissed-out and _achingly_ full in a way he hadn’t been in ages.

Veld kissed him back to reality, ungraceful with want but so spectacularly good at this, mouth a weapon as surely as his guns were. Veld set an unrelenting pace, thrusting into him with abandon, hard and deep. He pulled Vincent up, pinned him against the headboard, gripped the slats for leverage so he could force himself deeper. He could feel the hardness of Vincent’s length pressed between their stomachs, and Vincent moaned anew when Veld’s thrusts stimulated him there too. He clutched Veld so close it hurt, and, _oh_ _fuck_ this wouldn’t last long. He never wanted this to end, but he knew that Vincent was growing close again too, could read it in the stuttering motion of his hips, the shakiness of his breathing.

Veld pulled away for a moment, trying to regain some of his stamina, and Vincent took the opportunity to climb into his lap, back still pressed up against the headboard, his body sandwiched comfortably between the wood and Veld’s warmth. Shuddering a little, Veld nodded that he was ready, and Vincent lowered himself onto the man’s length. They moaned in unison then, foreheads coming to rest together for a long moment, hands tangled in one another’s hair, the violence of their coupling suddenly shifting towards something sweeter. Then Vincent rolled his hips, and Veld’s world went black behind his eyelids.

“Fucking perfection,” he breathed, barely coherent, fingers bruise-tight on Vincent’s hips.

He let his nails dig in, draw blood. The noise Vincent made was something wanting and desperate, and it sent him barreling towards the edge. Vincent would come untouched from this eventually, the pain and the blood and Veld’s cock brushing against his prostate again and again, but Veld was coming undone. Close, too close. He wrapped his fist around Vincent’s erection and moved his hips in time with the other man’s, taken and taking at once. Abruptly, Vincent’s legs turned to jelly, and he stilled, tensing in Veld’s arms. He was gone, then, Veld knew, the build-up of his orgasm leaving him soundless until…

He peaked with a cry, gripping Veld’s shoulders tightly and burying his face against the man’s chest. Veld followed him over the edge immediately, holding him close as their moans rang out a discordant harmony and he spent himself into Vincent's waiting heat. For a moment they just clutched one another, reluctant to move, but Veld finally withdrew, helping Vincent settle against the pillows before flopping bonelessly beside him. They were both still and quiet as they came back down from their highs. Veld recovered first, fixing a warm, small smile on Vincent and reaching out to toy gently with the long strands of his hair. Veld had forgotten how much he loved seeing his partner like this, fucked-out and languid, open and vulnerable in a way he was at no other time. It was a rare occurrence, had been even in the days when they'd spent almost every night in each other's arms. He didn't let himself go like this often. 

As Vincent settled back into himself, he watched Veld study him and realized that he wasn’t the only one of them who had changed over the years. How long had it been? _Thirteen_ _years,_ Veld had said. That… _ached_ in a way he couldn’t quite explain. Veld was bulkier than he remembered, weight that hadn’t been there before broadening his shoulders and softening the chiseled definition of his muscles the slightest bit. It felt…good, in a way, to feel so small in comparison to him, despite his advantage of height. In the dim electric lights, he could see the laugh-lines that crinkled around Veld’s eyes, and for a moment, he mourned what was lost so badly it ached.

They were getting an apartment together once Vincent returned from Nibelheim, they’d decided before he left. A nice place, new construction, not due to be completed until around the time Vincent would be relieved of his assignment. Veld had already paid the deposit. Vincent had argued, at first; he knew it wouldn’t be long before Veld was up for promotion, and he didn’t want to do anything to compromise that. It wasn’t so unusual, Veld reasoned. Plenty of them shared apartments with their partners. More often than not, partners spent more time together outside of work than they did apart anyway. Vincent finally agreed, enjoying the prospect too much to dig his heels in.

_He imagined actually coming back from Nibelheim, moving into the place they’d picked out, a bright and airy high-rise. He imagined a thousand mornings waking up beside this man, soft sunlight streaming into their loft through gossamer curtains. And there would actually be furniture and decorations, because of course there would be, because it was Veld and he cared about shit like that. And they would burn Vincent’s favorite incense, and cook together every night, and it would feel like home. He imagined a thousand nights spent on their balcony, illuminated only by candles and starlight, drinking red wine as Veld gave him whiskey kisses. He imagined getting to watch those laugh-lines slowly crinkle around his dark honey eyes, kissing each one and drawing out more of the smiles that put them there._

They had made this idiot pact that they’d get married if they were both still single when Vincent turned forty, and though Vincent knew Veld had made the promise half in jest, Vincent swore it to his soul. He knew even then that there was no one else he would rather spend his life with. If he had to wait thirteen years for Veld to realize the same, then so be it…

 _Thirteen years._ Vincent’s heart stuttered.

“Veld?” he whispered, shakily. “What day is it?”

Veld closed his eyes and took a deep breath. “October thirteenth,” he said quietly.

“Fuck,” Vincent croaked, and the tears finally came. Veld rushed forward to take him into his arms, cradling him close.

 _Fuck_. He wanted to live with this man. Die with this man. He wanted to grow old with him, that luxury almost universally denied to men like them. Vincent shuddered. Veld would grow old— _was_ growing old—without him. He couldn’t stop it. He was powerless again. This was his fate, he realized. He was damned to watch every person he ever loved die while he sat by, untouched by age, powerless to stop it. _This_ was the punishment for his sins. It wasn’t the pain, or the nightmares, or even the demons. It was the slow march of time, on and on, always moving forward. Without him.

Veld held him as he broke apart, utterly. He shattered in a way that he hadn’t since he’d first woken and discovered what Hojo had done to his body, sobs quaking his frame so violently Veld feared his breathing would stop.

“I’m right here,” Veld murmured into his hair, clutching Vincent as if he could hold his broken pieces together. He rocked him slowly, hand running in soothing circles along his shoulder blades, trying to coax his breaths into a rhythm. Veld knew that it was exhaustion that found him rather than peace, when his tears finally dried.

“Let’s get cleaned up,” he murmured into Vincent’s skin after a long silence fell and he had a chance to take stock of exactly how wrecked they both were, smeared with cum and blood and sweat and tears. “Come on. I’ll take care of you.”

“Servant’s bathroom,” Vincent croaked in a whisper, voice wrecked from his sobs. “End of the hallway.”

Veld was glad the bathroom was close. He wouldn’t have been able to carry Vincent much further, and his back would probably punish him for this tomorrow, he thought as he sat Vincent down in the large communal tub and turned on the hot water. It would take a while to fill. He glanced around the room. There was a bar of soap on the side of the tub, dusty but serviceable, and there were still towels on the rack in the corner.

“Do you think you might still have a change of clothes here?” he asked after a moment. Vincent gave a tired shrug.

“Try my room,” he suggested hoarsely. Veld wasn’t sure he remembered what room was his, but he didn’t want to ask.

“I’ll be right back,” he assured him gently before setting out to the second floor.

Vincent’s room was on the right side of the hallway, he remembered, but he wasn’t sure which door it was. Somewhere close to the end of the hall. He pushed a couple of doors open as he walked, glancing in before moving along. He gave a soft sigh when he opened the door to the next-to-last room on the hallway, finding himself in a space that was undeniably Vincent’s. The bed was still neatly made, corners tucked so tightly that the comforter was still unwrinkled after all this time. His gun cleaning kit sat on his nightstand beside a few weathered paperbacks, the only other outward evidence of his habitation. He hesitated slightly before making his way over to the dresser. It felt just as wrong now as it had the first time, snooping through his things. He remembered standing in this room thirteen years ago, trying not to cry in front of his subordinates as he sorted through Vincent’s belongings for clues about just what exactly had happened here—reading through the letters he kept in a box in his sock drawer, correspondence from Veld and little, flirtatious notes penned in a feminine hand he assumed was Lucrecia’s, mostly. His father’s pocket watch had been there once, as well, but Veld carried it in the breast pocket of his suits now, its ticking a comforting second heartbeat. He’d taken his incense, too, burned it some days when the ache for him grew too painful.

He took a deep breath and opened the top drawer of the dresser quickly, glad to see it was still filled with Vincent’s clothing. He grabbed a familiar set of nightclothes and hurried back downstairs. Vincent looked half-asleep in the deepening water when he returned, not even glancing up at the sound of his entrance. His eyes opened finally as Veld sank into the tub beside him and turned off the water, though they closed again when Veld gathered him up in his arms, encouraging Vincent to relax against him, pulling the taller man back against his chest. They were still for a moment before Veld picked up the washcloth on the side of the tub, lathering it up before running it gently over Vincent’s skin, slowly cleaning away the evidence of their tryst. Vincent was boneless against him as he worked a lather through the man’s tangled hair, tension finally gone from his muscles, and he released a little noise of protest when Veld left the tub again briefly before returning with a comb.

“You’re a treasure like this,” Veld murmured against his skin as he gently worked the comb through Vincent’s hair. He was fairly certain he was the only person who had ever seen Vincent this way, open and soft and trusting. He feathered a few kisses across the man’s neck, across the hickies and bite marks that stood out starkly from his pale skin.

“Go back to the parlor, all right?” Veld suggested as the water finally began to grow cool. “I’ll wash off and meet you right there.”

He didn’t want to let Vincent out of his sight, not now, not ever again, but he needed the moment alone, needed to process everything that had happened in the past few hours. It all felt surreal, but the ache in his muscles and the throbbing of new bruises reminded him that this had really happened. He’d come to his house chasing a ghost, and he’d found a man instead, changed and broken and scarred, but still his Vincent. He'd come here to let him go, to seek some otherworldly permission that it was all right to move on. But here he was, flesh and blood, and his touch, his taste, were just so achingly _familiar,_ so welcome, so missed. It was almost enough to let him imagine that things could go back to how they were, before, that they could settle as effortlessly back into the rhythms of life as they had settled into the bedroom. But, then...the reality. 

_He'd found him sleeping in a fucking_ coffin. _Sometimes he spoke in a voice that wasn't his. There was something in those scarlet eyes of his, especially when they were tinged with gold, that was alien and dangerous and_ hungry. _Something that was_ not _Vincent._

“What the fuck are we going to do?” Veld murmured tonelessly into the nothingness, clutching his head in his hands. 

Agony and shock and elation and pure, orgasmic bliss had all overstimulated him to the point of numbness, and he felt drained, physically and emotionally. He had no time to waste here, though. The man from Nibelheim would be back to get him tomorrow. There wasn’t much time. Shakily, he toweled off and went in search of his clothes, dread slowly blooming in his gut to overtake the warmth that had settled there at the first contact of Vincent's lips against his. Soon, they would both have to face reality without the aid of adrenaline or ecstasy, and look to the future instead of the past. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ngl, I am a fluff writer at heart, and I struggled with this one a bit. Hope it lives up to the wait. Any tips, pointers, suggestions, etc. are more than welcome.


	6. ...but home is nowhere

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Vincent and Veld try to clear up their feelings about the past and look forward to the future.   
> Suggested listening: "Salida" by Berried Alive https://open.spotify.com/track/7aL2MulkcheaoKzK7x5gWr
> 
> Not sexually explicit, but pretty dark/graphic at times. Updating tags for like two lines of internalized homophobia and the "f" word.

When Veld entered the parlor, carrying a bottle of red wine he had scrounged up from the kitchen, Vincent was settled next to the embers of the fire, staring blankly into nothing, like someone had simply left him there on pause. He looked more like himself, though, dressed in familiar black cotton pajamas that were a little too loose now, damp hair pulled back from his face in a messy bun. For a moment, he could almost imagine that nothing had changed, but then Vincent’s eyes caught the firelight, flaring scarlet, luminous.

“I have a surprise for you,” Veld said after a moment when Vincent didn’t glance up, holding up the bottle in his hand.

“I hope your taste in wine has gotten better over the years,” Vincent said finally, his voice almost normal again, most of the hoarseness fading from it. Veld poured him a glass of wine before refilling his whiskey glass and pulling his armchair closer to Vincent’s. “A wedding toast, then?” Vincent said tonelessly, and Veld couldn’t decide if it was a joke or a lament.

“I brought you flowers,” he informed the man with a sad smile. “Fucking Nibel wolves probably ate them.”

Air came out of Vincent’s nose a little harder at that, not quite a chuckle, but close, and he finally looked up to meet Veld’s eyes.

“Why did we ever wait?” he whispered after a moment, dolefully.

“I don’t know,” Veld mourned. Some shit about his career, his own internalized fear of the world seeing them for what they were. It seemed so stupid now. If he had the chance now, he’d scream his love for this man from the rooftops. And his career? With fucking Shinra? He felt mildly nauseous at that, tucked it away to examine later. “Vincent...if I could do it all over again—”

“We can’t change the past,” Vincent interrupted quietly, taking a sip of his wine. “I’ve spent the past decade and a half dwelling on everything I could have done differently. If I had just taken my pistol with me to the basement that day, then Hojo would be dead instead of me. And if I had just paid more attention, _talked_ to her, maybe I could have stopped this before then. Maybe I could have saved us all.” Another drink of wine, deeper this time. “If I told you, back in Midgar, to take your fucking assignment and shove it…”

He trailed off there.

“We would be drinking in that apartment right now instead of the Shinra Manor,” Veld finished. He had to reach out then, to touch Vincent, to assure himself that he was real. “We would be getting fucking married today,” he finished, voice breaking a little. _Vince in a suit and tie, black instead of navy, raven hair neatly trimmed and swept back from his face, flower in his lapel, smiling at Veld from the altar…_

“But we aren’t. Nothing we do now can change that.”

“I made you a promise,” Veld said sternly, “and I have no intention of breaking it.”

“No reason to feel guilty. You are a free man. Death has already parted us.”

Those words hit Veld like a physical blow, and he sat back from it, reeling.

“You are. Right. Fucking. _Here_ ,” he growled, shoving against Vincent’s chest forcefully enough that his chair rocked back a little.

Vincent narrowed his eyes in warning. It would be a fight soon if Veld didn’t find control of his temper. Vincent didn’t want that, but his demons certainly did. They urged him on, tugging at the reigns. He leaned forward and grabbed both of Veld’s hands, pinning them to his knees, grip comfortably snug and unyielding. For the briefest moment before Vincent closed his eyes, Veld thought he saw a flash of gold. Vincent’s breathing fell into a familiar pattern, deep and measured, grounding himself like he’d been trained to do. When he looked at Veld again after a few repetitions of his breathing, his face was calm again, eyes sad and gentle. He released Veld’s right hand so he could raise a gauntleted finger to his jawline, trailing cold metal knuckles across Veld’s flesh.

“I am a dead man, Veld,” he said lowly, “and I am already married to my ghosts. It would be unfair of me, to expect you to share me with them.”

“So, death has parted you from me, but it hasn’t parted _you_ from _them_ , those ghosts of yours?” Veld demanded through gritted teeth, trying to hold control of his temper. “That seems unfair.”

“What do you want from me, Veld?” Vincent asked in a whisper, his voice small.

“I want _you_ , dumbass,” he said, torn somewhere between irritation and heartbreak. Vincent let out a noise at that, a cold mockery of a laugh.

“So, what?” he demanded. “I just march back to Shinra and update the photo on my ID badge? Make sure to eat sandwiches in a separate breakroom from Hojo? You think we can just be _partners_ again?”

“I’ll leave the company…” Veld began, but Vincent interrupted firmly, fire flashing in his eyes.

 _“You will do no such thing_ ,” he hissed. “You think that’s an _option_ , knowing what you know? You know better than to think they’ll let you quit. You’re not a secretary; you’re a fucking _Turk_. A company spy. A Shinra assassin. Asset protection. If you try to walk away they will kill you.”

Veld fell into stunned silence for a moment. Vincent was right, of course. Being a Turk wasn’t exactly the sort of job that came with a retirement package, for more than just the fact that its members could expect to die far too young to need it.

“I’ll bring up charges against Hojo with Internal Affairs,” he started numbly after a while, scrambling, grasping for pieces of a future he could feel running like sand between his fingertips. “His ethics violations will get him fired, and he won’t have Shinra’s protection anymore.”

“Shinra knows. Not about me, perhaps, but about enough of Hojo’s ethics violation to see the man’s career destroyed. I wrote the President, when I found out what he was doing to Lucrecia and the child. Shinra knows.”

“Fuck,” Veld murmured. Trembling fingers reached into the front pocket of his slacks, pulling out a pack of cigarettes and sparking one to life. He drew on it deeply in silence, hoping the smoke would calm the queasy feeling that had arisen once more.

“What happened to the child?” Vincent asked darkly after a long silence.

“Child?” Veld asked softly.

“Lucrecia’s child,” Vincent said with a bit of heat. He needed to know the answer, more than anything. Veld gave a small shrug, eyes turning downwards.

“Heard it was a stillbirth.” He was unable to completely hide his sadness at the thought. He didn’t know why it made him sad, though perhaps it was simply because he knew Vincent would have wanted the child to be okay. Fuck, though, perhaps it was for the best. Plenty of the Turks had come to Shinra as runts, scrappy little brawlers and killers fresh from the streets, little boys who killed the family dog…and then the family housekeeper, or some equally obscene shit that marked them clearly unfit for polite society. Even the youngest of those kids had experienced life outside of the Shinra Building before it consumed them, though. He couldn’t imagine would it would have been like, for a child to be raised there…

“ _I heard it cry,”_ Vincent hissed, distracting Veld from his train of thought.

“I saw the body—”

“You saw _a_ body,” Vincent corrected. “Or do you believe Hojo is above murdering the innocent to keep his experiments quiet? Because I will assure you he operates under no such moral constraints. Where is _Gast_?” Veld’s eyes stayed down.

“Not sure. He disappeared when you did.”

“And you honestly think that you won’t disappear too, if you cross him?”

Veld finished his cigarette and lit another, offered it to Vincent. Vincent shook his head. Veld took a deep draw of the poison, and Vincent left him to smoke and brood in silence for a while.

“You never answered me earlier, when I asked if there was someone,” Vincent pointed out after a long pause. Veld wanted to protest lingering on this when they had so much else to talk about, more important things, but he found he didn’t want to face any of them, not just yet.

“There’s…a girl,” Veld admitted reluctantly.

“Is it serious?” his partner asked calmly. Part of Vincent wanted it to be, but he knew Veld better than that. It would never be that way for him, with women.

“For which one of us?” Veld murmured sadly with a sigh. “I like her. I really do. She’s great. We get along, but…” _But when she’d taken her top off and climbed into his lap in his living room, he’d clammed up. Too drunk, he told her later, and even though it was total bullshit, she believed him. He was less surprised the next time, managed to actually get it up, but when he had closed his eyes and sank into her, when her hands fisted in his hair, tugging hard at the root, he had imagined she was Vincent, and when that had grown too painful, he’d imagined her as one of the men who’d come before._ “I think she wants me to give her a ring. I don’t know if I can do that to her.”

“You’ve always wanted a family.”

“I’ve always loved the _idea_ of a family, but damn it, Vincent…I fuck men. And even if I weren’t a fag, I’m a _Turk_. I _kill_ people for a living. Kids shouldn’t grow up around that shit.”

And that made him think, again, of the child Vincent had mentioned, couldn’t get the idea of it being raised by Shinra out of his head. The thought made him ill.

Though many of the Turks came to Shinra in the midst of their childhood, Veld himself was lucky in that regard. He was almost seventeen he when got hauled in by Security Officers, though he’d been running drugs for the syndicate long enough to gain the skills necessary to impress the brass and end up in the Turks program. He had a family before Shinra, though, had experienced the world, was almost an adult. He had a chance to develop an identity as something other than a Shinra's guard dog. Most kids came in younger, thirteen, fourteen, whenever they were old enough to go from “desperate orphans” and “troubled youngsters” to “thugs” or “lunatics” in the public eye.

_Vincent had been twelve when they hauled him in, covered in blood that wasn’t his. They had passed Veld in the lobby of the Security Office on the way to interrogation room. The seven years between himself and Vincent had never felt significant to Veld when they were partners, but then the difference seemed radical—Veld, nineteen, just officially admitted as a formal member of the Turks; Vincent, twelve-years-old and cherub-faced, shackled and drenched in the blood of people he’d killed…_

_“Who’s the fucking toddler Ace dragged in today?” Veld asked a colleague curiously in the breakroom later. “Little bastard’s voice probably hasn’t even dropped yet.” (_ His voice had in fact dropped, Veld had learned not long after that). _The other Turk shook his head in mild disgust and sat down across the table from Veld._

_“Fuckin psychopath’s only here because he’s Grimoire Valentine’s kid.” He cast a glance at Veld to see if he seemed to recognize the name. He didn’t, so he elaborated. “Research department. You probably don’t know him. Anyway, kid’s a total headcase from what I’ve heard. Gets crazy and blacks out or something. Goes berserk. He paralyzed a kid and got thrown outta school a couple years ago. It was worse this time. A lot worse. I saw the pictures and…” a low whistle. “They would have put the little bastard down if he weren’t Valentine’s. They still fuckin should. Kid ain’t human. You can see it in his eyes.”_

(Vincent’s eyes were lovely, actually. He’d discovered that soon as well).

_It was almost six months after Security Officers had first marched Vincent, bloody and in chains, down the hallways of the Shinra Building before Veld actually met him. Veld was helping the cadets run through training drills when he found himself standing across from a familiar dark-haired boy. Without a word, the boy launched into the drill, taking the offensive role. They weren’t supposed to waste time talking, not to the cadets, at least—their chances or dying or flunking the program were too high to bother—but most of them at least exchanged names and said hello before they started training. Whatever._

_He learned quickly that the kid was…intense, especially when he fought. It was like his mind had slipped somewhere that thoughts and emotions couldn’t find him, hyper-focused on the fight, mechanical, efficient. But he was also just a kid, and Veld kicked his ass pretty handily when Vincent took the defensive role in their drill. One of his blows knocked the boy flat on his back, and Vincent hit the ground, air leaving his lungs in an audible huff._

_“Sorry kid,” Veld had said sincerely, reaching down to help him up. Vincent reached up to take the proffered hand, and his sleeve fell back, offering Veld an unobstructed look at the blown bruises from IV lines and track-marks that lined his arm. He tugged the sleeve down immediately once he regained his feet, drawing away from Veld in that strange, graceful way he had of moving, quick but still fluid._

_“The fuck they do to you?” Veld whispered with genuine concern, eyebrows knitting together._

_“I believe that information is classified, agent.” The kid didn’t sound twelve when he talked. His voice rolled out smoothly in a serious baritone, calm and indifferent, but when Veld looked at him, there was a flicker of something…_ dangerous _…in those wine-red eyes of his._

Vincent had never told Veld exactly what they had done to him, trying to get the black outs to stop, and Veld had never asked. Both of them were satisfied with sharing the knowledge that what had happened to him during the six months he spent in Shinra’s labs was something no child should ever have to go through.

But a kid being bred for that? Born to be a lab rat for the Shinra? The idea was nightmarish, too painful to linger on, too perverse to move past.

“If the kid were alive, would you want to know?” Veld asked after another silence. Vincent tensed, choked on his words once before managing to speak.

“Yes.”

“…Then I’ll tell you if I find something, no matter what else we decide here.”

“Thank you,” Vincent murmured, refilling his wine glass.

“The search would go quicker with your help, you know.”

“I can’t go back to Midgar,” Vincent said flatly, trying to make it clear the statement wasn’t up for debate.

“Then we won’t go to Midgar. We’ll figure something else out—”

“You don’t understand, Veld, I can’t be where there are people. These… _things_ I share my body with now, if they get loose…” Vincent trailed off. He couldn’t go on, didn’t want to trigger the memories.

“We both know you have better control over yourself than that,” Veld assured him, firm but gentle. Vincent stiffened at that, and after a pause, his eyes rose to meet Veld’s, and Veld saw something stir there—not one of the creatures Vincent shared his body with now, but an older demon, the same one Vincent had carried inside him as long as they had known each other.

“If that were true, I never would have ended up with Shinra in the first place,” Vincent reminded him darkly. Veld couldn’t help but shudder. He’d seen Vincent like that, once, pushed past his breaking point. He might have been seventeen, still a rookie, barely more than a kid, and still…seeing Vincent that way had terrified him. He’d understood, then, why so many of the other Turks gave him a wide berth.

“But you haven’t had a blackout since…” Realization dawned like a sinkhole in his stomach. “Did something happen?”

“You think Hojo would just create a new toy and not take the opportunity to play with it? That he might leave the results of an experiment untested?” Vincent closed his eyes, and despite all his efforts, the memories poured forth, unbidden. 

He had thought the first transformation would kill him _._

_He remembered waking on the table—fully, truly waking for the first time in…gods, how long had it been? The first thing he’d grown aware of was the agony, overwhelming his senses until he grew accustomed to the pain. Slowly, his other senses faded in—antiseptic in the air, mostly concealing the metallic scent of blood, the low hum of electricity, the drip of an IV, cold metal beneath his body, cold air on his naked skin. His vision came last. For a long while, the world around him was only white, the stinging glow of the electric lights erasing everything else. Shadows defined themselves slowly into vague shapes, solidified into objects. Color bled in like a sunrise. Memories came back in fragments._

_Lucrecia crying. A gunshot. Light gleaming off a scalpel. The smell of blood. Someone screaming. No,_ himself _screaming, his agony like a wounded animal, like all the men he’d tortured until they broke._

_He sat up and took in the scene around him. He was in a laboratory. Pristine white tiles on the floor. The table beneath him, the cabinets that lined the wall, were made of stainless steel. Three of the walls were concrete, but the last one…_

_The last one was glass._

_And behind the glass stood Hojo._

_He sat up. Too fast. His head was spinning. Everything felt…different now. His center of balance was off. He closed his eyes and tried to adjust._

_“I never liked you, you know,” Hojo sneered, his voice pouring out like oil, slippery and cold. Vincent opened his eyes, and the light blinded him again. Hojo continued talking as he slowly regained his vision. “You’re an arrogant, untrained dog that decided it should be allowed on the furniture with its master. It was no surprise to me when you decided to bite the hand that feeds. You think that you’re better than the rest of them, that you’re actually a_ person _who gets to think and feel for himself, but you’re just another Shinra bloodhound.”_

_“Lucrecia,” Vincent managed after a moment. His voice came out as a hoarse, rattling thing that chilled him to the bone._

_“Do not dare say her name!” Hojo yelled, and a small whimper came from the corner. For the first time, Vincent noticed the child by the door; she was seven, maybe eight, blond, in ragged peasant clothes. She stood on his side of the door. Vincent turned his attention back to Hojo. “She was_ my _wife! Mine!”_

 **_“Was?”_ ** _The voice Vincent spoke in wasn’t his. Something else rumbled under it._

_“If you hadn’t meddled, she would still be alive!”_

_Vincent roared at that, a wordless thing, hateful and anguished, morphing quickly to a scream of agony as his body began to change. It almost overwhelmed him when the first set of his bones broke, but a familiar strength kept his mind conscious, the strength of the berserker; battle-lust, blood-lust, void-lust. Truth was, Vincent had always been a little bit in love with Death, just so long as it was bloody. No doubt whatever was happening to him would kill him, but Hojo would die first._

_His muscles tore. More bones breaking, rearranging. Elongating, changing. His skin split. Fingernails fell off, red and bloody, as claws sprang from his right hand. His left hand was a crude, alien thing of metal and machine. He went blind again for a moment as the bones of his face shattered, stretched, reformed into an elongated snout. His teeth went the same way his nails had, dropping from their sockets one by one, and Vincent spat them, bloody, to the floor. Pressure as fangs grew to replace them. The sensitive nerves of his skin burned like fire as fur started to sprout, rippling across Vincent’s body in waves._

_Again, the darkness nearly tugged him under, and the strength that kept his head above the dark was alien to him this time, a primal, animalistic_ presence _in his head. He could not say_ voice _, for there was no voice, simply_ urges _—clear and obvious as any words—_ **kill, tear, shred. Blood on my tongue…**

_Galian Beast slammed against the glass that separated them from Hojo, and Vincent’s voice was lost for a while, drowned out by the beast’s hate and bloodlust. The child in the corner screamed. Galian Beast rounded on her._

“No,” he whimpered against the memories, fists pounding against his skull. He wouldn’t think about this. He couldn’t. “No!”

“Vince?” Veld was crouched down in front of him, Vincent’s face clasped in his hands, staring with horror into his partner’s eyes, open and clear but seeing something far, far away from here. “Vincent, look at me. Please.”

But Vincent didn’t look, because he wasn’t there. He was back in Hojo’s lab, trapped with a little girl. Someone’s child. Someone’s daughter.

_He could still taste the blood. Feel it on his teeth, hot on his tongue, slick down his throat. He could smell it, salt and iron overwhelming the scent of antiseptic. He could still hear her screaming, screaming until she was so broken she couldn’t scream any more. Her blood was still pumping weakly when he tore her throat out…_

Veld slapped him. A growl tore out of his chest, low and inhuman, some part of him still with the Beast in that memory.

 _“Look at me, Vincent,”_ he demanded, fingers digging into Vincent’s jaw. When Vincent’s eyes flitted up to meet his, they were gold, but it was still Vincent behind them…for now. His touch turned gentle then, stroking his face, his hair, trying to hold his eyes. “I don’t know where you are right now, but I know it’s somewhere bad, so stay. Stay here with me, okay?”

Veld paused for a moment, taking a shaky breath before continuing. He knew what was in the balance here. He was in danger of falling into his memories, getting lost there, letting whatever dark emotions he could see struggling beneath the surface bubble up and run free. He was in danger of losing control.

“I still wear that cologne that you like. Can you smell it?” He prompted evenly, fighting to keep his voice calm. Vincent breathed in deeply, catching a whiff of the familiar scent. Vincent gave the smallest nod. “You can hear my heartbeat, can’t you? Focus on it. Listen close.” Veld’s thumb trailed light circles around the back of Vincent’s hand. “Try to match your breathing to mine.”

He held Vincent’s eyes and watched him come back to himself, giving a quiet, shaky sigh of relief. The knot of dread in his stomach unwound like something physical.

“There you are,” he whispered. Vincent looked away.

“I’m a monster, Veld,” he said, voice small. “I always have been. All Hojo did was give power to the worst parts of me.”

Veld didn’t know how to reply to that, so he held his silence and Vincent poured the remainder of the bottle of wine into his glass and took a long sip. He had met the worst parts of Vincent, and there was nothing familiar in them, nothing rational, nothing human. He wouldn’t argue with a person who called them monstrous. He had always been so glad that Vincent blacked out when he was like that. It was a blessing, not to have to remember that the next day. He wasn’t sure if the Vincent he had known, strangely sensitive and gentle for a man in their profession, would have been able to reconcile that part of himself.

“You aren’t a monster Vincent,” Veld protested. Why did the words almost taste like a lie? Vincent laughed a little at that, a small, hard thing.

“All my life, everyone has tried so hard to protect me from myself,” he said derisively. “Fuck protecting the world from me, right?” he scoffed. “No cost has ever seemed too heavy so long as we saved Vincent Valentine from having to meet the monster in the mirror, but it’s too late. I know exactly what I am. I always have.

“I don’t have blackouts, you know,” Vincent admitted quietly.

“What do you mean you _don’t have blackouts?_ ” Veld asked incredulously. He’d been there when it had happened, after all, and one day he’d finally been brave enough to find the security footage of Vincent that day, committing the murders that had resulted to him being dragged to Shinra in handcuffs.

“I don’t. I never have. You don’t remember blackouts, but I remember. I remember everything. The first time it happened, I couldn’t talk about it, so I said I didn’t remember. Someone said the word blackout, and I clung to it. The doctor mentioned that being good, that remembering doing that sort of thing would break me. But I _do_ remember. I remember how it felt to be a passenger in my own body, to watch on while something… _else_ …used me. Nothing has changed. My new demons have their own faces and names instead of sharing one with me, that’s all.”

“Then you already know how to control it,” Veld insisted after a long silence in which he struggled to process the information Vincent had given him. 

“Oh, I do?” Vincent asked, arching an eyebrow. As if they hadn’t both witnessed him almost lose himself to his beast mere moments ago.

“With practice—”

“It’s _Chaos_ , Veld. I am _Chaos_. I cannot afford the luxury of the sort of mistakes that come along with ‘ _practice_.’”

“I’ll stay here with you. We’ll practice together. Gods know nothing can piss you off like me, and I trust you, Vince—”

“You shouldn’t,” Vincent interrupted. “But that is beside the point. You belong to Shinra, remember?"

Inside, Veld was screaming, and he felt as if it were going to burst forth any moment, his cry of helpless frustration, of heartbreak. He wanted to break down and cling to Vincent, beg him to come home, but he knew emotion wouldn’t sway his partner. Only logic would, and logic seemed distinctly to favor Vincent. He knew emotional displays were useless, but still he found his head dipping into Vincent’s lap, a quiver in his voice when he spoke.

“Come home,” he begged. “Come because I asked you to. Come home because I’ve missed you every day for the past thirteen years. Come because I never want to spend another day without you. Come home because I _love_ you, you fuck.” His voice broke, and he had to pause to clear his throat. “Come home, and we’ll figure something out. _Anything_. We can do anything as long as we’re together.”

Vincent was crying slow, silent tears.

“ _Vincent,”_ Veld choked.

“I love you too, Veld,” Vincent whispered. Veld looked up at him, and there were tears brimming his eyes now too.

“Say it, you asshole,” Veld said with something between fury and agony. “If you’re really going to do this to me, you better at least have the stones to say it.”

“I assume you have scheduled transportation to take you home,” Vincent said evasively.

“Someone from Nibelheim is coming to pick me up tomorrow at sunset,” Veld replied stiffly.

“Then you will leave here tomorrow at sunset, and I will remain behind,” Vincent finished quietly. 

“Fuck you, Vin,” Veld said in numbed disbelief.

“Please, Veld, not tonight,” he murmured, running his fingers through Veld’s hair. “It’s our last night—”

“It wouldn’t be our last night if you weren’t sending me away without you,” Veld said scathingly. “Don’t ask for pity for something you did yourself…”

The sense of deja vu hit them both at the same time, and they both laughed helpless, painful laughs at the shared memory. They’d had the same conversation, roles reversed, the night before Vincent had left for Nibelheim.

“I never saw you again after that night,” Veld observed sadly. “Swear to me, Vincent, that won’t be the case this time.”

The silence that passed was too long, too painful.

“I swear,” Vincent breathed at last. A little bit of the tension left Veld’s shoulder’s, but…

“And I don’t mean showing up at my deathbed or some shit, okay?” he clarified sternly. “I expect to hear from you. I expect to see you. Soon. If I have to drag my ass back here during my vacation for midwinter because I haven’t seen your face in months, I’m going to be extremely pissed off.”

The silence was longer this time.

“All right,” Vincent said at last. “We can work out terms before you leave tomorrow, okay?” he continued gently, petting Veld’s hair. “I just want to enjoy tonight, to enjoy _being_ with you tonight. Does that sound all right?”

“You manipulative bastard,” Veld breathed in a laugh. “Okay. Tomorrow.”

This time, on their last night, they both needed the same thing: comfort and affirmation. They made love again on the sofa in the parlor room, sweet and slow, brushing butterfly kisses across the bruises left behind by their previous exploits. They drank more, even daring a trip to the wine cellar adjoining the basement to give Vincent a better choice of vintages. Then they took more drink back to the servant’s bathtubs to clean off the evidence of their last round of sex. There, in the hot, steamy dimness of the bathroom, loosened by the drink, Veld traced Vincent’s scars and Vincent traced Veld’s wrinkles, kisses following the touch. And those marks made the both of them sad, not because they viewed either of them as a flaw, but because those marks represented challenges they’d both been forced to face alone. They slept in each other’s arms, and for the first time in thirteen years, Vincent didn’t have nightmares. They woke midmorning, well-rested, and shared the supplies Veld had packed for himself for breakfast.

“I’d offer you a cup of coffee, but—” Veld began.

“I would love one,” Vincent called back from across the kitchen, where he was busy turning powdered eggs and a few of the ingredients that Veld had packed for dinner and not eaten the night before into ham and cheese omelets.

“You sure?” Veld asked. “I didn’t bring any sugar.”

“Black is fine.”

Veld froze for a moment when Vincent said the words, quelling his immediate desire to press his partner. Vincent put _creamer_ in his coffee—not just milk, but that sugary, vanilla-flavored shit the secretaries drank. He didn’t protest, though, just made two mugs of coffee and joined Vincent on the other side of the kitchen. Vincent was fully dressed, because _of course_ he was, the same cotton pants and long-sleeved shirt Veld had gotten him last night covering his scars. Veld was wearing boxers and nothing else. He slipped up behind Vincent and placed his hands on Vincent’s hips, reaching around him to set his cup of coffee on the counter beside him. 

“Since when the hell have you drank your coffee black?” he pressed curiously. Vincent chuckled a little, and Veld saw his blush creep up his neck, his hair still tied up in a bun.

“Since I realized in Nibelheim that it tastes like you,” he admitted, and Veld laughed into his back.

They ate together, and Vincent suggested mimosas. There was, of course, no orange juice, so they simply drank prosecco instead. They took a nap and promised to talk terms when they woke… 

Only Veld _didn’t_ wake. Not, at least, until he was bumping along in the passenger seat of a rundown truck, well on his way back to Nibelheim.

“What the fuck?” Veld groaned groggily, rubbing his pounding head.

“He said that you’d have a bad headache when you woke up, and also that you’d be very angry,” the farmer he’d paid to ferry him back and forth to the mansion said from the driver’s seat. “He said to tell you to drink that bottle of water and take that medicine before you said anything else and you’d feel a lot better. “

Veld snorted, but obeyed, taking the bottled water and pain killers Vincent had left for him out of the center seat and swallowing them both down.

“Before you ask, I’m not going back to that _fucking_ mansion,” the farmer spat. Veld hadn’t taken him for the swearing type, and he absently wondered what Vincent had done. “And I doubt anyone else in town will either.”

“You want to explain to me what the fuck happened?” Veld snapped irritably, his still-pounding head leaving him in a piss-poor mood.

“I pulled up to get you and this… _man_ …he was…” the farmer struggled for words, and Veld sighed, impatient.

“I know him. Don’t bother wasting your time describing him. What _happened_?” he pressed again.

“He opened the door and threw you in the passenger’s seat. Strapped you in, handed me a letter and that little hangover kit there and told me to give them to you when you woke up.”

“Letter?” Veld demanded. The farmer nodded his head towards the visor, and Veld flipped it down, grabbing the sealed envelope. He scanned the contents of the letter and folded it back up, taking a deep breath and gritting his teeth..

“Where did he go? The man who gave you this letter?” Veld growled.

“I don’t know, sir,” the farmer replied meekly.

“There had better be a _damned_ good reason you just let a strange man stuff your unconscious client in your truck and drive away without even _questioning_ him first.”

“He held a gun to me and told me if I didn’t drive back to Nibelheim and not turn back, he’d shoot me. I believed him,” the man said in a quavering voice. “I could see it in his eyes.”

“I supposed that’s a damned good reason,” Veld huffed, easing off. There wasn’t anything this man could give him. No point in rushing it, then. He turned his full attention to the letter.

_Verdot,_

_I’m so sorry, Vel. I’m a bastard, I know. I know you will call me a coward for this, and perhaps you are right, but this was the only way. Slow down and listen to me. By the time you’re awake to read this, there’s no point in rushing. I’m already gone. Turn off what you are feeling right now and think, really think, about what I’m about to say._

_I could not afford to let you dictate the terms of this. You let your feelings blind you. You overestimate me. Last night, I came too close for comfort to unleashing my beasts on you. On_ you _, Verdot, the last person in this world that I love. I want more than anything to return to Midgar with you, but I cannot take the risk. You are too precious to gamble with._

_I am leaving Shinra Mansion. I do not intend to return, not for any significant amount of time, at least. Don’t even bother trying to find me. You won’t. Whatever else I am now, I am still a Turk, rogue agent though I may be. Besides, you have other things to devote your resources towards. You promised me that you would look for child. If you want to see me on your terms, find out what happened to Lucrecia’s son. If you need to send word to me, about this subject or anything else, send the mail to the Mansion. I will get it eventually._

_Also, I’m sorry about the headache. All I had was laudanum and it took a lot to get you under, but at least half of it must be the whiskey, and that's your own damn fault._

_With Love Always,_

_Vincent_

Veld read the letter, read it again. The farmer let him out at the train station. There was no high speed back to Midgar from the little village of Nibelheim, so as the old coal train chugged along, Veld stared out the window and contemplated everything Vincent had said.

_Find the child._ For the first time in so long, he had a goal he truly cared about, one more important to him than the hollow victories of promotions and awards. It was a chance to perhaps right one of the many wrongs Shinra had committed, to save at least one life from further misery. He couldn’t help Vincent, but he could, perhaps, help this child. And by helping the child, he could see his partner again. He could kiss him again. Punch him again, too, for running off without a proper goodbye. He looked ahead.

Veld had come here to leave Nibelheim behind him, and in that, at least, this trip had been successful. For the first time in thirteen years, the shadow of that Manor didn’t loom over him, and _he looked ahead._ Finally, for the first time he could remember, he was looking ahead without a feeling of dread pooling in his gut. For the first time, he looked ahead as a man at peace with himself, a man sure of what he wanted for himself. And he was confident enough to reach out and take it, the rest of the world’s opinion be damned.

He opened the notebook he did his brainstorming in and turned his thoughts towards the future.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> First off, I'd like to apologize for how incredibly long it took me to post this final chapter. I was busy with friends and didn't have quite as much to devote to working on this as I wanted to. This also fought me tooth-and-claw. This was really supposed to be a one-shot, porn-without-plot, self-indulgent blip of a fic, and when I started writing this I honestly intended for Vincent to just go back to sleep, but I got here and just couldn't do it. I don't know if I'll go anywhere with this specific story, but I'll definitely be posting some (actual) one-shots soon inspired by this story.


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